It turns out that the marriage ceremony for followers of the Goddess of Love is extremely informal, which suits me right down to the ground. I’m not a very formal guy. I just don’t get it. Wouldn’t people prefer to be nice and relaxed? What’s formality get you but ulcers?

Over lunch, we explain to Hypa what happened with her goddess and after she comes down from her excitement from having been possessed by her chosen deity, she invites us to take tea with her in the living room. Wendy and I sit on the couch while Caedi and Hypa take the chairs. The apprentice’s smile is brighter than I’ve seen before. And why wouldn’t it be? She’s probably happy for us, jazzed that her apprenticeship is almost done, and ecstatic that she met her goddess. She doesn't say anything about it though. I think she's just too shy about such things, which makes her chosen career maybe a little odd.

Come to think of it, I just met a goddess. I know this is a simulated world and a goddess here is much different than a divine being from reality. Probably. I’ve never been an atheist exactly, but I don’t think I qualify as an agnostic either. I hope there’s a God. Sometimes I think it’s more likely than not. For all I know my soul is in heaven right now while I’m down here, a hollow bunch of ones and zeros fooling around inside somebody else’s mainframe. I have no way of knowing. I’ve never met Him and He’s not talking. Here, Hyparien is a real life hugely powerful entity and she’s my buddy. Or seems to be. Which is awesome.

Okay, I better try to avoid thinking I understand the goddess and her goals. Seems like a good way to get smited. Smote? Smitten? Can’t be smitten, can it? Though that seems more grammatically correct to me somehow, the contexts in which the word normally appears, well, all I can picture is a dude in the sky with a long flowing white beard punching another dude halfway through the crust of the planet for looking at him with little pink hearts in his eyes.

I’ve allowed myself to get distracted so we’re ten minutes or so into tea when I realize that this is the ceremony and I’m in the process of getting married.

Wendy figures it out just before I do. She says, “Wait a minute, this is it? This is how you do this?”

“Do what, dear?” asks Hypa.

“The marriage ceremony?” Wendy says.

Hypa sits her cup down and smiles. “Yes,” she says. “We talk about you and your lives together. Your plans. If you had family here, we’d speak to them too until everybody was ready.”

“Ready for what?” I ask.

“For me, in my goddess’s name, to pronounce you married,” says Hypa.

You know what? It seems like a good way to go about it now that I think about it. What we’re all used to is a priest or a preacher or whatever talking at us and telling us all what’s going on. This is inclusive and inviting. There's audience participation. 

I’m glad Wendy’s dad isn’t here. He’d freak out and conversation would be impossible. Probably. He’s a bit closed-minded? It could be I’m being unfair though.

“And then we’re married?” asks Wendy.

“Well, there’s a document I give you but, yes,” says Hypa.

“Well okay then,” says Wendy and she giggles.

“We’re having a conversation,” says Hypa. “Not a lecture. Feel free to ask anything or interrupt any time you need. Now,” she picks her cup back up and takes a sip. She turns to me. “Mark, what is it about Wendy that first drew you to her?”

I say, “Her kindness.”

Hypa and Caedi share a look. They smile.

“What?” I say. I’m wondering if I said something wrong.

Hypa takes a sip, allowing her apprentice to field the question.

“You didn’t have to think very hard,” says Caedi.

I wave a hand. “Oh, that,” I say. “No, easily it’s her kindness. It’s how we met. I’d just bombed a test—.”

“No, you didn’t,” says Wendy.

I roll my eyes. “Okay, a C isn’t a bomb, but I felt like I’d failed. My first major was psychology. I liked it a lot when I was in high school, and I really wanted to help people. I was going to be a clinical psychologist, you know?”

“Um, Mark,” says Wendy. “They probably don’t.”

“Oh. Yeah. Well, a clinical psychologist listens to people’s problems and helps them. They treat mental illnesses with therapy. Talking and stuff. They don’t prescribe medicine though,” I say.

Caedi says, “Oh, that’s the kind of thing we do. As priests and priestesses sometimes, though as healers we often use medicine as an aid to our divine magics.”

Hypa nods. “Most other faiths stick to physical health alone. Love requires more from us.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I can see that. And I tried but I wasn’t really enjoying the classes at the college level. It seemed to me like my professors kept trying to make everything too simple, like there could only be one cause for somebody’s issues. Upbringing or sexual repression or something. People aren’t made like that. Where it’s just one thing? Maybe I just wasn’t understanding it all, but I wasn’t doing much better than a C most of the time and I didn’t want to be a C anything.”

“C is average,” explains Wendy.

Caedi says, “Oh.”

“Sorry,” I say. “I’m not trying to be confusing. Well, anyway I’d just gotten a C on a test and realized that psychology wasn’t going to be my thing. I was sitting on a bench outside the hall reevaluating my future. I was bummed. Wendy sits beside me and asks if I was okay. I’ve always had… strong reactions to kindness, especially from beautiful women. I think I was halfway in love with her within the next five minutes after that.”

Wendy nods sagely. “He certainly was,” she says.

Caedi giggles.

Hypa says, “And you?”

“Same,” says Wendy. “It was clear that he was upset not because his life had upended, even though it had, but because he wasn’t sure how he was going to help people. Mark is kind, and I love that, but he wants to help even more. I think that’s wonderful. He made me see that sometimes helping isn’t always kind or gentle.”

“What do you mean?” Hypa asks.

“We had a friend. Jack,” says Wendy. “A sweet kid he knew from high school. He had trouble adjusting to college. I don’t think he’d ever been away from home more than a few days before he moved into a dorm. He kinda lost control. Drinking and gambling. He kept his roommate up all hours, and it actually got to the point where they had a fistfight. Mark broke it up. He sat Jack down and spelled it out for him, brutally. Like, literally. Jack went for him, and Mark punched him in the stomach and went right on talking at him until he began to talk with him. We were dating at the time, and I was there, sitting in a corner, watching the whole thing knowing that I couldn’t do what Mark did.”

“Yes, you could,” I say. Wendy’s tough. If she needed to talk to anybody like that, she could.

“Maybe now,” says Wendy. “Not before you showed me how and why. Mark, you showed him how much pain he was spreading around, what he was doing to himself, and what he was risking. And you did it in alphabetical order. You wouldn’t let him look away from it or dodge a question. You were ruthless. It took hours but by the time you were done you and Jack were hugging and swearing you were brothers.” She beamed at Hypa. “Jack was doing fine, getting As and Bs, good grades, when we wound up here. He told me once that Mark saved his life.”

I am shocked. “He said that?”

“Yep.”

The conversation goes on like that for a couple of hours. Things I love about Wendy. Things she loves about me. Things about each other that drive us crazy. Hypa is sure to point out to us that, eventually, it’s the things that bother us about each other that we’ll come to love more than anything else and I remember my grandfather sitting on a bed after gramma died, bawling his eyes out because her shoes weren’t by the foot of the bed for him to trip over anymore. He’d tripped over them for over fifty years.

Hypa says to us, “Love, like many other things, is something you get used to. Now, when it’s still new, you look at each other and feel it deeply. That little leap inside. That excitement that he is looking at me, that she is choosing me, that feeling of endless possibility. It can be overwhelming. However, you get used to it and, if you’re not careful, you might find yourself thinking it’s gone or fading. Then, Mark, one day the light will hit her right and it’ll be like you never saw her before, like she could not be more beautiful. Wendy, he will say something or do something, and you’ll feel it again just as intensely as ever. It is in the nature of a person to get used to things which can lead them, naturally and through no fault of their own, to take them for granted, to undervalue them and pine away for what was, what they think is gone, for something new. This is foolishness. Your love will last if you keep in mind that it’s like when you’ve hurt your leg, or in this case, maybe your belly.”

Wendy and I share a look.

Hypa laughs. “Mark, now that you’re not in constant pain, do you sometimes forget that you’ve been hurt and turn too quickly or stand up a bit too vigorously and get reminded?”

I nod. “All the time.”

“See?” says Love’s priestess. “You’ve gotten used to it. There are reminders that often come when you forget because you’ve forgotten. Love gets like that. Pay attention to the reminders. Allow yourself to feel them thoroughly, remember, and your love will never truly fade.”

Wendy smiles at me. Tears are standing in her eyes.

Mine too.

I’m holding her hand. I doubt I’ll ever get used to this feeling. It doesn’t seem possible. It’s too fricking large, but then again, what do I know? I’m only almost twenty-two.

“Now,” says Hypa. “Caedi, is there anything you would like to add?”

Caedi sets her cup down to look at us. “Yes,” she says. “You have something others do not. You have an assurance of your love. You know it is fact.”

Wendy says, “Erota. We couldn’t access it if we didn’t love each other.”

“Exactly,” says Caedi. “This is an advantage you would do well to remember. But, it may also give you unique problems. Where most couples might allow their doubt to fuel their interactions and shore up their relationship through insecurity, you have certainty. This lack of fear and doubt may encourage a lazier approach to building your relationship. Love can be a poor foundation for a relationship as long as it remains merely an emotion. It must be an action, serving you both and each other, daily. Minute by minute. Love is work and will sometimes feel like it. Neglected, it will often sour and soon. I do not say this to darken this day of joy, but Erota is something new to you and there are no others today familiar with it who may instruct you in its dangers. Hypa is right, I think. Pay attention to love, feel it, share it, take it and give it, remember it, and work through it and it will never wholly abandon you, I’m sure.” She smiles and looks a bit flushed. It’s more than I’ve heard her say since we got here.

She has a lovely smile too, now that I’m studying it. It's of a completely different quality than Hypa’s. When Hypa smiles, as I think I’ve said, it’s impossible to resist joining her. It is all warmth and invitation.

Caedi’s version, when she lets it out, makes you think you’ve seen a wonder. A secret, just for you. It makes you want to get her to do it again.

“Oh, well done, my apprentice,” says Hypa and pats Caedi’s knee. “I’ve seen loves that work when they shouldn’t,” says the priestess. “And loves that don’t work when they should. With you two, well, you seem to know how to work together, whether that was something you did well before in your old world or something new or you’ve improved upon once you got here, I have no way of knowing. I think that you will be fine and, for what it’s worth, you have my poor blessing.”

“And mine,” says Caedi.

Wendy launches herself at Hypa, hugging her and then going just as hard as Caedi. “You are our first two friends here,” she tells them. “Your blessing is just as important to us as your goddess’s, who is awesome by the way.”

I can only agree.

Hypa gives Wendy a peck on the lips. “Well, then I say that you are married!” she says and laughs.

“Hey, I’m supposed to do that!” I say and Wendy runs to me and I kiss my bride.

A few moments later we’re alone in the living room having come back up for air and both of us are breathing hard. We stand and go for the bedroom.

“Oh!” comes Hypa’s voice from the kitchen. “Mark, you are cleared for… a moderate amount of getting carried away, I should think. Don't hurt yourself. Good night!”

“Thank you!” Wendy, my wife, calls, giggling, and then we’re through the door and clothes are flying off like only two highly trained martial artists can manage.